Malvina Menard Labine (1893-1967), Reeve Of Azilda, Ontario
Gramma Labine gave birth to 20 children. Four months after the last one was born, in 1940, Grampa Labine suddenly dropped dead one Saturday morning in the marketplace where he managed a food stall. Gramma and Grampa were dirt poor, but Grampa had a life insurance policy so she now had the means to tear down the old log house, which was falling apart, build herself a "proper" home and buy a truck and food freezer. Because she knew the pangs of an empty stomach, she took to going to the local grocery store every evening and purchasing their day-old bread, which she then popped into her food freezer. Her neighbours consisted of people much like herself where the women managed farms and the men worked either in the local mines or in the lumber camps further north all winter. If Gramma heard of someone who had lost their job or became ill, she would quietly stock the truck with frozen bread, perhaps adding some fresh eggs or butter or cheese, and drop these off after dark to the unfortunate family. She did this well into the fifties.
Eventually, she built a small bungalow in town. The local township was supposed to put a culvert in place once the building permit was issued, but they procrastinated and every time it rained, Gramma had water problems at the house site. She got fed up. She gathered a group of her lady friends and asked them to appear early the next morning in front of her house and to bring picks and shovels. She then notified the local newspaper that it might be a good idea for them to send out a reporter with a camera the next morning. The following morning the women went to work and the reporter had a field day. The story hit the local paper and the next morning the township bulldozers appeared. The culvert was put in place immediately.
Gramma was not educated in the formal sense of the word, but she exhibited a highly-developed emotional intelligence that didn't go unnoticed by her neighbours. There was a municipal election coming up and the only candidate was the local school principal, an educated man who expected to be re-acclaimed. Someone approached Gramma and asked her to run. She thought the man was out of his mind stating that her qualifications certainly did not equate to running a township. Her neighbour disagreed and began to rhyme off the names of the people who would back her. Most of these were the former recipients of the day-old bread and they formed a majority of the townspeople. Needless to say, Gramma won by a landslide and held that office for years until she unfortunately came down with an Alzheimer-like condition and was unable to continue.
Once, when I was fourteen, during her tenure as reeve (equivalent to a city council president) I was sent to visit her for a few weeks. It was summer and I traipsed about in a sleeveless shirt and "decent" shorts. One of the town councilors approached her and more or less accused her of moral leniency in allowing her charge to "go about dressed like that." Gramma retorted that, although she would not be comfortable in shorts (she weighed 300 pounds), she thought they looked cool and comfortable and did not impose her own preferences upon others. And that was the end of that discussion. I wore the shorts all summer.
This woman remains the shining beacon who has influenced most of my major decisions in life. Grampa was fortunate to have married this go-getter, who didn't cave in when life threw a curved ball. She died in 1967, at the age of 72 and is buried in Chelmsford, Ontario. Soon she will be joined once again to her daughter, my mother, who died in 2005.
Gramma Malvina was a "Memere Extraordinaire."